Conclusions: Processional Books and Dirty Books

By way of concluding, I wish to speculate on other indications that pre- modern Europeans may have brought plague-related devotional activities into the home, and on other materials that may have helped penitents go on processions ‘in spirit’. In the absence of the kind of pestilential prayer books that Borromeo issued, many Christians would still have had a cheap, printed book of hours on hand.40 As Virginia Reinburg describes them, these prayer

39  Hamilton S. and Spicer A., “Defining the Holy: The Delineation of Sacred Space”, in Spicer A. – Hamilton S. (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: 2005) 7.

40  L.M.J Delaissé called the book of hours ‘the first medieval best-seller’, which is particu-larly true of France, England and the Low countries, to a lesser extent in Germany and Italy. Some were deluxe illuminated editions fit for royalty, but down-market prints were also widely and more cheaply available. See Wieck R.S. (ed.), Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: 2001) 28–31; Dondi C., “Pathways to Survival of Books of Hours Printed in Italy in the Fifteenth Century”, in Myers R. – Harris M. – Mandelbrote G. (eds.), Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade, (London: 2007) 113–132; Hindman S. and Marrow J. (eds.), Books of Hours

41 Singing on the Street and in the Home in Times of Pestilence

books ‘provided a bridge between the liturgy and the home,’ and the devo-tional practices prescribed and described therein ‘were at the same time both individual and collective, public and private’.41 Books of hours allowed the devout to carry with them the rituals that they participated in publically and to re-create them wherever they happened to be. Books of hours facilitated that goal in a variety of ways. They may have included pictures that further in-voked the stock of images that the votary already knew from other devotional places, imaginatively transporting her into the scene depicted or other ritual spaces.42 The text of the prayers themselves may have encouraged perfor-mance, both musical and physical. Some prayers, such as the common rhym-ing sequence to St. Sebastian ‘O Sancte Sebastiane, semper vespere et mane’, were possibly designed to be sung.43 Others committed the votary to devotion-al movements. A prayer that tells Mary, ‘At your holy feet … with humble heart and prostrate body, I pray’, for example, adopts a virtual posture of humility for the devotee. Another that describes penitents who come to St Martha ‘hands joined, knees bent, heads uncovered’ portrays a procession.44 Like a script, such prayers guide the votary through the enactment, either actual or imagi-native, of devotional rituals and gestures.

Is it possible, then, that books of hours could have facilitated the ‘domes-tication’ of the anti-pestilential procession? Art historian Kathryn Rudy’s in-novative work on the material signs of use in books of hours is revealing.45 Using a densitometer, a device that measures the darkness of a surface, she compared the dirtiness of pages of various books of hours to determine which were the most handled – and therefore most used – by the user (or even users across generations).46 The results for one Dutch book are particularly interest-ing for our purposes. In MS 74 G35, held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the Hours of the Virgin are, across the board, the dirtiest, likely on ac-count of the quotidian use of this office. In the later sections of the book, the

Reconsidered, Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History (Turnhout: 2013) 6–7.

41  Reinburg V., French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, C. 1400–1600 (Cambridge:

2012) 6.

42  Ibid., 123–125.

43  Ibid., 146.

44  Ibid., 165.

45  Rudy K., “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer”, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, 1–2 (2010), 1–26: http://www .jhna.org/index.php/past-issues/volume-2-issue-1-2/129-dirty-books.

46  Rudy avoids dark patches that result from damage and calibrates her reading against the natural darkness of the vellum.

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42 Chiu densitometer spiked again at the Penitential Psalms and at the Litany of the Saints that follows them. The dirtiest pages in the entire book, however, are in the suffrage section and contain an antiphon to St. Sebastian:

Distinguished martyr Sebastian, master and propagator of the holi-est teachings, behold your name written in the book of celholi-estial lives.

Therefore, intercede for us all. By the honouring of your memory to our Lord Jesus Christ, may he deign always to liberate us from plague and from epidemic death. Pray for us, blessed Sebastian, so we are made wor-thy of the promises of Christ.

The Penitential Psalms, the Litany of the Saints, and a prayer against pestilence – the user(s) of this book of hours handled those pages over and over again, clear evidence that plague weighed heavily on their minds. It is im-possible to know for certain, of course, from the signs of wear in the book alone how they performed these prayers (was this a solitary performance, or did the whole family sing the Litany, creating a different kind of ‘processional’ com-munity?) or whether they even performed them with the procession in mind.

Nevertheless, the availability of the liturgical elements of the anti-pestilential procession at their (dirty) fingertips – and in a book, no less, whose generic ex-pectations included singing, enacting pious gestures, and making public ritu-als private – makes such a domestication of the ritual an attractive possibility.

Then, as now, the management of disease was not a straightforward proj-ect. In times of plague, civic and religious leaders had to carefully balance the demands of spiritual and biological health, both communal and individual.

When faced with the obstacles posed by the threat of contagion, pre-modern Christians found new ways to carry out their spiritual duties as a community.

Within this picture, singing served as an essential tool for maintaining a conti-nuity of devotional practice in the challenging conditions of plague. Whether performed publically or behind doors and windows, music brought the prayer-ful thoughts and spirits of the penitents together to fight against the communal scourge. The devotional activities during the outbreak in Milan can teach us many lessons on the texture of ritual practices in this period. Those activities can reveal to us, in turn, the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of the devout in the face of crisis. As Randolph Starn writes, ‘[the] chronic presence of disease suggests that we should not think of medieval and early modern so-cieties as caught in the grip of plague-year panics or as waiting passively to be delivered by modern medicine. The newer accounts [of plague history] speak of “experienced populations,” of well-organized institutional responses, of

43 Singing on the Street and in the Home in Times of Pestilence

resourceful strategies for survival’.47 Our history of Milanese devotion in times of pestilence is precisely such a narrative of organisation and resourcefulness.

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© Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004375871_004

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License at the time of publication.

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